Herman Hollerith, the American inventor with German family background, renowned as the developer of the punched-card evaluating machine, died of a heart attack at the age of 69 in Washington on 17 November 1929, eighty-five years ago.

His parents immigrated from Germany to the United States, and Hollerith was born in New York. He entered the City College in 1875, and received his engineer of mines degree in 1879. Not long after his graduation, Hollerith contributed to the 1880 census as an assistant to his professor, William P. Towbridge.

In the coming decades, he worked as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, experimented with pneumatic brakes or worked for the Washington Patent Office for brief periods. In the meantime he was engaged in searching for a solution to a problem: how it was possible to automate the tabulation of census results.

In 1886, he invented the punched-card evaluating machine, which could be used to do electronic counting. The punched cards, as if in a sandwich, were placed between copper rods. When there was a hole in the card, the copper rods contacted, and created a closed electric circuit. The machine was designed for processing the data of the 1880 census. Processing of data manually would have taken up more than a decade.

By the 1890 US census, Hollerith had invented the machine that processed statistical data by reading and systemising them electrically. The invention was a great success in the United States, but it achieved even greater success in Europe. In 1896, Hollerith established the Tabulating Machine Company in New York for the manufacture of the machine. Hollerith’s firm had merged with various other companies, before IBM came about in 1924.